


That breathes upon a bank of violets

by darkandstormyslash



Category: Harlots (TV)
Genre: F/F, First Time, Fluff and Sweetness, f/f love, f/f lovemaking, gratuitous shakespeare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 03:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12950073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkandstormyslash/pseuds/darkandstormyslash
Summary: Amelia Scanwell discovers she can read books other than the bible, and Violet takes her to see a play.Written as a Yuletide treat - enjoy!





	That breathes upon a bank of violets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alexandria (heartfullofelves)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartfullofelves/gifts).



Amelia visits regularly, walking up the narrow steps to the small room where Prince Rasselas lives. She brings soup, and poultices, and takes on nursing his lover with the same care and attention she shows her mother. It never occurs to her not to. He’s ill, and she can help, so she does.

She doesn’t speak often, companionable enough in silence. As Rasselas’s lover slowly starts to get better Amelia wants to read to him but it seems wrong, somehow to bring in a bible. Prince Rasselas sees her confusion, and hands her a small volume that contains a play, ‘ _Every man in his humour’_ by Ben Jonson. Day by day she reads her way through it.

His lover was an actor, she discovers, who one day bent down from the stage and kissed the awkward young Molly who came to every play to watch him, and almost caused a riot in the process.

“When I first saw _As You Like It_.” Prince Rasselas tells her, “It was in a tiny room, not even a theatre. They changed the ending, and the acting was very bad. But I saw that play and I knew who it was that wrote it. I knew he would understand me.”

He liberates a small marbled volume for her, ‘Twelfth Night’, from Quigley’s house. The plays of Shakespeare are not so popular nowadays, but they are still thought of as classics so Quigley has a little pile of them that she uses as props. Amelia tucks it under her pillow and reads it in the evenings, before the light is lost, shamefully thankful that her mother cannot tell by sound alone that it isn’t the pages of the bible she’s turning.

The play is full of words that make her flush, hot and cold all over as the foppish Orsino falls for his page Cesario and the sea captain Antonio declares his love for Sebastian. She feels her breath catch as Cesario, who is really a woman disguised, uses wooing words to win Olivia. Amelia wonders if some part of Olivia knew, as she must have done, that Cesario was no man.

She wonders if Olivia ever felt for a man at all. She wonders if maybe there’s a reason Olivia struggled to find a husband, and decided to refuse all suitors for seven years.

Rasselas is right, she thinks, that the man who wrote these plays would understand, would understand her and Violet. It warms her heart to think that there are others out there who have felt what she feels, the little books are a guiding light in a dark confusing world. It no longer feels sacrilegious to press the bible up against the plays tucked under her pillow.

When she finds out about Amelia’s new love of plays Violet takes her to the Covent Garden theatre, insisting that she’ll never understand just by _reading_ them. Amelia bites her lip nervously in the crowd as they wait for the play to start. She’s sure that without Violet’s hand slipped into hers she would run. But she doesn’t run, and eventually they’re all packed into the theatre, and there’s nothing to do but squeeze Violet’s hand even tighter and try not to think of just how many sins there are being committed around and about them.

There are as many ways to sin as there are ways to love. Jesus died for her sins, she knows, but he also died for love, and maybe they are all just starving sinners trying to find a way to feed each other.

This play is mostly singing, and the voices warble like birds through complicated melodies. Violet passes her a sweet-biscuit wrapped in paper and nods at the lead soprano, “That’s Charlotte Brent that is, she’s mistress to the man who wrote it, that’s why she gets all the best parts.”

Amelia chokes on the biscuit.

“And her…” Violet nods at the pretty, curly-haired young woman rather unconvincingly dressed as a servant, but Amelia catches the woman’s eye before Violet can finish. The woman, who has just finished singing about how sad she is her lover is leaving, gives the demurely dressed Amelia a salacious wink and suddenly Amelia knows exactly what Violet was going to say.

By the end of the play the curly-haired young woman’s lover still refuses to take her back. She does not seem overly upset by this, despite the sad words she sings.

They spill out into Covent Garden with the rest of the crowd and Amelia feels her heart is overflowing. She has never spent an evening like that, never had words to express the high-ranging passions that could fill a body. She has always found it easy not to stray, to keep away from lustful thoughts and men with terrifying sharpness in their eyes. She’d felt nothing but concern for the harlots forced to do so, shuddering at night to think of how awful a life that must be.

There are words in the plays she reads to Rasselas and his lover that Amelia does not yet have an understanding of. Each time she meets with Violet, she thinks she understands them a little more, peeling back layers of meaning like the peel of a sweet orange. The first time she lets Violet undo the back of her dress, there is poetry for it waiting in her head. The first time she feels a soft sweet kiss between her shoulder-blades, the first time she runs a hand in wonder along the curve of Violet’s leg. How lucky she is, that these feelings have been felt the world over, through time, through place. She is not the first to hack her way through an untrodden path, at every turn there is a guiding hand from those who have come before.

“Make me a willow cabin at your gate,” She murmurs into Violet’s ear, quoting the words Viola speaks to Olivia. The words a woman uses to woo a lady tired of men, “And call upon my soul within the house.”

“You what now?” Violet laughs, leading her back from the theatre down the dark and cobbled streets.

“Write loyal cantons of contemned love, and sing them loud even unto the dead of night.” Amelia laughs back, giddy and excited, her mind all in a whirl of new ideas and desperate longing. She doesn’t think she’s ever spoken so loudly before, “Halloo your name to the reverberate hills, cry out ‘Violet’!”

Violet silences her with kisses, and the kisses speak louder than words.

When they reach the brothel Violet leads her gently up the rickety stairs and into the bedroom, lighting a candle in the darkness of the room. Amelia slides her dress to the floor, the first time she has been completely naked in front of Violet, in front of anyone except her mother. She should feel vulnerable and exposed but instead she feels excitement, her naked body suddenly warmer and safer than a layer of starched cotton. Violet draws back and for a moment almost looks afraid.

Amelia takes her hand and gently draws her closer. “What is it?”

“You’re too perfect. You always have been.”

“I’m not perfect!” Amelia laughs, gently pressing her nose against Violet’s cheek. “Look at my chin! My hands are cracked, there’s a mole on my side, and I smell of meat because I’ve spent the evening pushed up against a butcher at the Covent Garden theatre.”

“You are the kindest and sweetest thing.” Violet kisses her chin, her hands, her side. “I couldn’t bear to think you might go your whole life without anyone telling you.”

Violet is trembling as Amelia helps her take off the last of her petticoats and suddenly the situation feels reversed, as if Violet is the inexperienced one. Maybe she is, Amelia thinks, and kisses her gently. “Do you want to, if you want to, do you think we could…”

Even her recent study of plays has not given her the words she needs to describe what they are about to do. The only words she knows are crude and dirty, and this feels almost holy.

She kisses Violet’s wrist in reassurance, then lets her kisses move down, along the dark skin of Violet’s fluttering stomach, down her hip, into her thighs. Violet’s hand trembles against her hair and Violet’s voice whispers out, “Yes, oh yes.”

Violet’s voice has never been so quiet. Amelia has never felt so pure. She leans up to kiss between Violet’s legs, breathing in the scent of it, and she knows that single kiss contains a truth more profound than any word ever written in any play.

They lay on the bed together in the morning, limbs entwined, watching the sun come up. Violet sighs and murmurs, resting her head against Amelia’s shoulder. “If I’d known taking you to the theatre would have that effect, I’d have spirited you off the moment I first saw you.”

“Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.” Amelia quotes back drowsily. “It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

Violet gives her a lazy smile, rolling over in the bed, body stretched out. “What’s that? One of your Shakespeares?”

“No.” Amelia smiles back, “That was the bible.”

**Author's Note:**

> The play Violet takes Amelia to see is Thomas Arne's "Love in a Village". Charlotte Brent was indeed the leading lady, and she was also Arne's mistress.
> 
> Violet is of course quoting from Twelfth Night, the Queerest of all the Queer Shakespeare plays.


End file.
